All Sorts of Stuff

Okay, So like, it has been a month since I sent something out and with schoolwork heating up, who knows when I will get something out again. So if I don't type something NOW, I may not get anything out until June.

I am back up at Humboldt State University after a really fun Christmas break. I spent a lot of time with my brothers which was really great and saw a lot of old friends back in Chicago. I had a wonderful adventure when my parents decided to be an “emergency host family” for an Indonesian Exchange student. My brother Parker and I drove up to northern Wisconsin and waited in a frozen parking lot for an hour to pick him up and bring him back to Chicago, where he is living with my parents until the end of June. Something we were glad to do. Actually, Chicago was surprisingly warm for December/January, it never really got below the 20's and I don't think it snowed once the whole time I was there. This was great because I was able to go running without completely freezing my tookus off. My mom and my brother often went running with me as well.

When I returned to California, I spent a few days in Oakland with my grandmother and my cousin before a friend of mine from Santa Cruz drove up and picked me up. We drove up to Sacramento and spent one night up there before coming up to Humboldt to start school. Being in Sacramento was really fun. Sac is a great little town and there was something awe inspiring about seeing the Capitol building, even if the stuff that goes on underneath that dome sometimes makes me want puke. But I'll take a screwed up democracy over an efficient dictatorship any day. So, instead of Mr. Smith goes to Washington, it was Mr. Imrie goes to Sacramento (that sounds hokey, really hokey, but I am going to leave it in there anyway.)

If you watched the news any over the Christmas holiday you know that the northern coast of CA was hit pretty hard with some storms in Late December/January. However, there is not nearly as much storm damage as I thought there would be up here. A few trees are down and we were delayed for about 40-50 minutes coming up US101 because crews were clearing up a rock slide. But other than that, there doesn't appear to be much damage from the storms that came through. I haven't gone into the woods very much yet – too muddy – so there may be more damage that I haven't seen.

Classes. In some ways, my class structure is very similar to what I had last semester: four academic classes, a physical education class, and band. Like last semester, I have a mix of major classes and a class that I need for my upper division general education class. My classes are Comm 105 – intro to the Communications Major, Comm 422 – communications development in children, Comm 480 – Social Advocacy, Anthropology 303 – intro to evolution and a weightlifting class. My classes are mostly on Tuesday and Thursday with my weightlifting class on Monday, so my Fridays are open for homework.

So far, Anthropology is my favorite class and I think I am discovering something. In the past I have always divided the academic world into “halves,” the “Science Half” and the “Arts & Literature Half”and I have always felt that I was much more comfortable in the A&L Half. But I really enjoyed my psychology class last semester and it looks like my Anthropology class is going to be a whole lot of fun. And what I think I am discovering is that there is a middle ground between A&L and Science known as the Social Sciences and that may be where I actually am happiest. We will see.

I also like my Social Advocacy class, even though the instructor is slightly to the left of Karl Marx. Fortunately, he's got a great sense of humor and seems pretty open. I don't think I am the only non-liberal in the class (I use the term non-liberal because I am not conservative by any means,) because he joked a little bit with another kid in the class who he apparently had in another class last semester about crossing swords politically. I think he'll let me do something “not liberal” for my semester project.

My Com 108 class is a little tough, because its an 8am class and even though I TRY to get 7 hours of sleep, it doesn't always happen and so I am a little zonked that early in the morning. But my friend B is in the class with me and that's really fun and I like my professor, who is also the head of the Communications department and my academic adviser. He is pretty cool and I think this is going to be a fun class.

My communications development is going to be very interesting. It is going to be studying how Children learn to communicate. Our textbook is a little tough to read, but it is also a little funny. This class seems to be a mixture of psychology, sociology, and linguistics, so I think this will also be a good class.

My weightlifting class is really great. I like the way it is structured and I HOPE it will prepare me for firefighting this summer (I also HOPE I get the firefighting job.) We meet 2x a week in the weight room where I do a variety of lifts, and then we are required to document 15 hrs of “outside” physical activity. Since I've been running and doing calisthenics three days a week for the past six months anyway, this should not be a problem.

Band is pretty much unchanged from last semester except that we have a few new people and a new person has been elected to the position of Ax Major, what we call our band leader – because she carries a large ax instead of a baton. The new Ax Major is a music major and a little more organized than the former one was, so things are a little more disciplined, which I think is a good thing.

I had an interesting experience last night. We have a circus club that meets on campus and somebody from the circus club had invited me to bring my accordion in and play with the circus. So I showed up and there was another accordion player, a guitarist, a clarinet player, and another dude who had some small little guitar like thing, it was almost like a six-stringed ukulele, but I think he called it a guitarita. Anyway, we played what I think was klezmer music – it sounded like it had an Eastern European/Jewish influence to it. It had a based around a Im IVm V7 chord progression, for those of you that know music, and had a little bit of a oom PAH beat. They want me to come back but the problem is that they meet at the same time that the Band meet. Maybe I can go to Band one day and the Circus the next. The band and the Circus do a lot together anyways. We shall see.

Well, that's life up to the minute. Everything else is fine.